ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Holocaust survivor Saul Dreier looks at a plaque that honors victims of the Holocaust during a ceremony at Lynn English High School on Friday.
By LEAH DEARBORN
LYNN — Holocaust survivors Saul Dreier and Reuwen Sosnowicz are living tributes to the importance of memory.
Both survivors took part in a forum at English High School Friday to commemorate the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, otherwise known as the “Night of Broken Glass.”
Dreier, 92, and Sosnowicz, 87, were guests of local participants in the Global Embassy of Activists for Peace. The two met when they formed the Holocaust Survivor Band, which has since performed at Schindler’s factory near one of three concentration camps where Dreier was imprisoned as a teenager.
The pair are also musicians and their band has played for crowds in Israel and at the former camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
“We were two strangers, but now we act as brothers,” said Dreier, who relayed an experience he had while visiting Treblinka, a place where more than 800,000 Jewish prisoners perished.
After lighting a candle in tribute to the dead, Dreier said the sky opened and rain poured down on the former death camp.
“God saw us coming and made sure six million people were crying at us with big tears— that’s how the rain came,” said Dreier. “We are here to say, never again!”
Sosnowicz told the audience about being separated from his parents when German soldiers sent dogs into the crowd of refugees attempting to flee into Russia. He ran through the night back into wartime Poland and was picked up by a farmer driving a wagon full of hay.
The same farmer allowed the then 10-year-old Sosnowicz and another Jewish boy to hide in his barn for the next five years.
“It was five years of hell for me,” said Sosnowicz, who eventually reunited with his family after the war.
Robert Leikind, director of the Boston chapter of the American Jewish Committee, also spoke at the ceremony.
Leikind spoke about the lives of his parents, both of whom were Holocaust survivors, and called memory a tool capable of reshaping lives.
“People didn’t necessarily hate their Jewish neighbors,” said Leikind. “They were making choices. There were hundreds of thousands of decisions made by individuals.”